Carefully Beautiful
by KuraraOkumura
Summary: "You know when you catch someone staring at you, normally that person looks away blushing, goes back to what they were doing, and tries their damnedest not to get caught again. But not this guy. This guy just kept on looking at me." Ereri, three-or-four-shot, Modern Uni AU. Feels warning. M/M. MAYBE smut in the final chapter.
1. Chapter 1

Chapter 1 of 2

* * *

I noticed when he first took notice of me. It was a cold winter afternoon, in the Trost Café on the street next to my apartment. I came in and shook the snow off my shoulders and hair, tamped my boots against the mat and then turned back to help Armin and Mikasa in from the cold. I saw him outside, hood slipping and snow gathering in his hair, but he didn't seem to mind. His eyes were fixed on mine. I looked away without thinking much of it, but ten minutes later, after my friends and I had sat down at our usual corner and were laughing at some joke or other, I saw him again, in the corner opposite to us – and staring straight at me.

You know when you catch someone staring at you, normally that person looks away blushing, goes back to what they were doing, and tries their damnedest not to get caught again. But not this guy. This guy just kept on looking at me, staring straight into my eyes as he lifted his steaming coffee cup to his lips by the tips of three fingers and took a burning sip. I wondered for a brief second how he could even _drink_ that – the thing was so hot I could see it fuming from where I was. But I could only think about something else for so long before his eyes – cold, hard steel – brought me back to reality.

I swallowed.

I looked down at my table, cursing myself for being the blushing one, but when I looked back up he was still staring at me, so I tried my best to focus on Armin and Mikasa again. But the conversation we'd been having about our lowly college lives suddenly seemed unnervingly boring.

I didn't look at him after that, but I knew he was still there. I could feel his eyes on me the entire time, even after we'd paid the bill and I'd put my thick coat back on, and even after I'd long left the coffee shop and was trudging along in the snow, going my separate ways with Armin and Mikasa, I could still feel his eyes on me.

For some reason, I didn't panic. Normally, in this situation, people give frantic looks behind them to see if they see anyone, then start walking faster and eventually break into a run screaming. But I wasn't your regular person either. I knew how to defend myself – a life born and raised in the suburbs at the hands of fifty local rivalling gangs does that to you. As such, I wasn't afraid of what he might have wanted to try. In all my nineteen years, I'd found few people able to overpower me, and even then they didn't do so easily. And even if I hadn't had that assurance on my side, I just had this feeling – gut instinct, really – that told me that the guy wasn't looking for a fight.

He'd had that feral look to him alright. Those eyes could cut better than any blade. And the bags under his eyes told me he could have used a good night's sleep, which made me wonder what he usually spent his nights doing. He was small, but not weak – nobody physically weak could ever have that constant look of provocation, of threat, in his eyes and survive to tell of it. People who provoked others had it coming for them – that was something else I'd learnt. I suppose I had that same look in my eyes, more or less – Mikasa had often complained that I was nearly always the one getting them into trouble. But that might have had something to do with my big mouth…

Nonetheless, I wasn't about to run and hide. I never had before, and what was there to make me start now?

I saw him every day after that. In Trost Café only at first, but then he began to make appearances in an increasing number of my usual places; the local park, the Shiganshina Cafeteria, the university campus… I saw him more and more, and though he still appeared to be spending his time staring at me, I tried not to let it get to me. I wasn't frightened or freaked out; no, that wasn't my type. It was more like I was angry that he'd invaded my privacy like that. He seemed to know all my favourite places, the times at which I would show up this way or that, and sometimes when I walked home from classes I would get that same feeling of being observed… It was infuriating.

I never talked about him even once to Armin or Mikasa. Mikasa would probably have tailed the guy to high Heavens and slashed his throat for 'frightening her poor Eren', while Armin would have sat me down to talk through every possibility of me knowing or not knowing that guy. But that wasn't what I wanted to do. I think, in a way, I wanted to know what he was going to do. What it was he wanted from me. I'd grown used to catching sight of him from the corner of my eye, here sitting at a swing with children, here at his now-usual table in Trost Café, or tailing me in a crowded street. He was good at it, too, I might add. But the thing was that after a time, as much as _he_ was watching me, getting to know me, _I_ was also watching _him_. Unbeknownst to me, he'd become a part of my routine, and after a few months of this, my day didn't feel complete if I hadn't caught sight of him at least once during the day.

After a time my anger faded to curiosity, and my curiosity to interest. I watched him in earnest now, staring back at him when I caught his eyes, no longer blushing when our gazes met. I was never sure who broke our staring contests, but I do know that when I looked at him and he looked at me, I had a small half-smile on my face that had often raised questions from Armin. I was, in earnest, finding that he was just as desirable a mystery to me as I must have been to him.

I tried to approach him a few times. Only once or twice, for I felt that actually getting to talk to him would break the carefully fragile bond we'd somehow built between ourselves. But every time I made a step towards him, even under the pretence of marching to the ice cream van beside where he was seated at a table or at a bench, he disappeared. He knew I was watching him, and he acknowledged that just as easily as I had first acknowledged the fact that _he_ was watching _me_. But he did not want me to get close to him. Whether that was from fear, apprehension, a simple disinterest, or something else, I did not know.

Then, one day, he simply stopped appearing.

It was the middle of spring, and our little dance had been on-going for at least six months now. My day went about as usual; college, Trost Café, park, home. I knew that something was off. I felt twitchy and on edge all day. My eyes were drawn to every dark corner, every unusual shadow that I deemed of the appropriate size to belong to the one I was so desperately looking for. I snapped at those who spoke to me, grit my teeth and tightened my fists and resisted the urge to pounce on everyone I knew. The number of times that I had not seen him for a day had happened rarely enough that I could count them on the fingers of one hand, and even then he always came back the next day, looking for more, extra present as though to excuse himself of his absence the previous day. But this time felt different. And I was right.

It _was_ different.

He didn't come the next day, or the next, or the next. I didn't see him, _couldn't_ see him, no matter how hard I looked or how unpleasant a person I was to those who tried to understand my mood.

With him gone, my routine was broken. He had never been a part of my life. Hell, I had never even known his name! I didn't know any of the things he knew about me; his habits, the way he liked his coffee, his best friends, his status in life—

It infuriated me. That this man, this stranger, could have this much effect, this much influence on my life—I hated it, hated him for it. All at once, on the day he stopped coming, my anger returned and consumed me once more. I was insatiable.

Then before I knew it it was winter again, and I was trudging home in the snow and the cold with my hood on my shoulders and the snow gathering in my hair, and on some kind of faraway instinct I stopped, and looked up, and I didn't have to look far.

There he was. Still fucking perfect and immoveable. His hood was up this time, and it hid his face, but I would have recognised him anywhere.

He stood with his feet slightly apart, one of them raised as though he'd been in the middle of a step. That was how I knew he'd seen me, too. With the fact that he was just standing there, hands in his pockets, completely immobile and with his foot half-raised to take a forever-unfinished step. We'd noticed each other at the exact same time. There was a cape on his shoulders, a piece of dark cloth that fluttered around his thin waist and hips like wings, and when his raised foot dropped slowly to the snow-covered ground I suddenly remembered to breathe.

I inhaled.

For a long time neither of us moved. We stood fifty feet apart, barely just silhouettes in the white backgrounds, snow whirling around us with the wind and our eyes fixed nowhere and everywhere at the same time.

I didn't know what to do. I had no idea what the hell I was supposed to do with him. He'd been gone for six months, and hadn't I been angry at him for leaving me? But my anger was gone now, disappearing just as suddenly as he had half a year ago… Half a year… So many things had happened in that time. And I suddenly didn't care that I didn't even know his name, I wanted to tell him about everything he had missed. All the things he should have known about me now but didn't because he'd been gone all this time. He'd tell me where he'd been later. Didn't we have another six months to go before he left again?

Without a word, without a sign, I took a few more steps to my left, stopping in front of my door and taking out my key to stick it into the lock. I fumbled awkwardly with my gloves for a minute before managing; it clicked and swung open. I shoved my set of keys back into my coat pocket with the gloves I'd just taken off, and stepped inside; I left the door open behind me – hoping he'd take the hint.

I stomped my boots on my doormat, just like I remembered doing twelve months ago at the Trost Café where we'd first noticed each other. I crossed the long hallway lined with the doors of each of my classmates' apartments, and stopped on coming to one of the last few. I waited for a few seconds, fishing my set of keys back from my coat and looking for the correct one, listening until I heard him shut the door behind him, until he'd seen what door I was standing at, then I unlocked it and stepped inside, again leaving the door open for him to come in after me. The first room I came into was the living room, with a sofa, a table and a TV; the second, a small kitchen; the third, a bathroom; and the last, the only bedroom.

I stepped into the kitchen after throwing my coat on the back of the sofa carelessly. I made myself coffee, hesitating before fixing him a cup too. I heard him when he stepped inside; heard his light footsteps, the way he shut the door oh-so-quietly behind him, his breathing, and when he pulled off his cape and coat and laid them beside mine on the back of the sofa. I didn't realize I'd been focusing on it until the cup in front of me began overflowing with the coffee I was pouring into it. I gave a quiet "Fuck," placing down the coffee pot and cleaning up the mess, leaving the dirty cup in the sink to wash later. I made another one, then took a deep breath and stepped into the living room.

He was sitting on the arm of the couch, one foot propped up against it and the other flat against the ground. He wore a black jumper, and underneath it a white button-up shirt, and below the waist a clean, neatly ironed set of grey pants. I wondered how his clothes didn't even look rumpled or wet from the snow and frost. Only his shoes, knee-high black boots with a slight heel, looked the tiniest bit scuffed. His clothes made him look thin, but what I could see of his neck sticking out from the jumper and shirt told me he wasn't all that thin; he only looked it. He had short jet-black hair shaved in the back, bangs framing his pale face like an angel's wings.

He looked at me when I came in, and if I'd thought he was perfect before, his eyes took all words away from me.

"Hi," I said. I didn't know what else to say; the cup in my hand all but forgotten.

He smiled. "Hey… _Eren_."


	2. Chapter 2

Chapter 2

* * *

My breath hitched. _He knew my name._ I hadn't told him anything about me, and yet he knew my name. That should have scared me, I suppose. But it didn't.

It was the same as ever; no matter what he did, I couldn't find it in myself to be afraid of him.

Nothing had changed, after all.

I sat down, remembering the coffee in my hands just as the liquid was beginning to edge towards the rim of the cups. I looked down and straightened them, then set the two on the low-lying table in front of me.

Then he broke my daydream.

"I don't drink coffee."

I looked up, startled. "What?"

"Tea," he clarified. "I drink tea. Coffee's fucking vile. You drink that shit?"

I blinked. The least I could say was that I was taken aback by his language. In two sentences he'd spouted more foul words than I usually said aloud in an entire week. And he drank _tea_ ; what was he, a fucking Englishman or an Asian chick?

I choked on a bout of laughter, swallowing hard as his eyes bore down on me. I couldn't tell if he was annoyed or amused, but I had a feeling playing it safe was the better of my options.

"Tea?" I choked, standing on shaky legs, still trying not to laugh.

"Yes," he said patiently, chin resting on a fist, and this time I was sure I saw amusement in his eternally bored eyes, and I instantly felt better. I smiled at him, and to my surprise he smiled back.

I staggered back a little, then spun on my feet and headed back to the kitchen, hands moist and nervous. I ruffled through my cupboards for several minutes before figuring I ought to ask him what kind of tea he drank, and shouted from the kitchen, "What kind of tea do you drink?"

"Green," came the answer, and I jumped back and around because his voice came from much closer than I'd been expecting it.

He was leaning against the frame of the door connecting the kitchen and the living room, arms and legs crossed and his silver, blade-like gaze fixed on me. "Hi," I said again, stupidly, then held my breath as he started to move. With slow, controlled steps, never leaving his eyes from me, he came closer to me, and my breath whooshed out at once as he walked past me and reached into an open cupboard behind me. His hand emerged holding a small, dark-looking paper bag, the size of my fist. The label was blurry, probably due to the mini-panic attack I'd just suffered, so I couldn't figure out what was written on it.

He shook it expectantly in front of my face, an eyebrow raised and no doubt expecting me to understand something of his antics, but I was too busy staring absentmindedly at his hand to comprehend quite anything behind it. "Hey," he said. " _Hey_ ," he repeated, louder, when I didn't answer, and I snapped my gaze to his face.

"Hey," I answered, still not totally re-focused, breathing interrupted momentarily.

He rolled his eyes. "Tea," he repeated. "Green. Make," he said, nodding in the direction of the boiler. He shook the bag one last time in my face, then dropped it on the counter and walked back out the same way he'd come in.

I blinked again, then turned to the counter and, taking a deep breath, began tasking myself with fixing this strange, strangely rude-yet-not-rude man a tea. It was as I was making it that I realized the tea he'd picked out from my cupboards was a sack I'd picked out for my mother when she came over to see me. But when she'd died, I'd stuffed it into the back of my kitchen never to look at it again. Until now.

I was stuck for a few seconds then. Then the moment passed, I made the tea, and, allowing it to infuse slowly, stepped back into the living room with the brand new asked-for cup.

"Tea," I said to him. "Green."

He smiled. He said, "Thanks, brat," then looked at the cup and said, "Three minutes, max."

I nodded, though I didn't understand. "Sugar?" I asked him, indicating the sugar-filled porcelain pot sitting in the perfect center of the table.

He grimaced. "Never. Green tea has to be drunk pure."

This seemed to me like a very important rule, but once again I didn't understand, and nodded seamlessly, accepting his refusal stoically.

This reminded me, as I struggled for what to call him, that I didn't know his name – and that he knew mine.

"How do you know my name?" I said.

He shrugged. "I have ways."

"Ways of what?"

"Of knowing things. Of finding out about things I want to know."

I said, "And you wanted to know about me?"

He looked at me. "Yes. Very much so."

"Why?"

He shrugged again. That made me bristle a little. "Why—"

He interrupted me. "If you want to know what colour I shit in the morning and how many people I fuck on a regular day, just ask."

That made me smile. I opened my mouth to ask just that, but he beat me to it.

"Same as everybody else; and recently, zero." Then he smiled, too; the tiniest lift of the lips – but it was there.

"I assume that's brown," I blurted out, blushing for some reason.

He lifted his eyebrows.

"Brown. The colour you shit in the morning," I clarified helpfully.

He didn't smile exactly. But it was the closest I'd seen him to it.

"Name's Levi," he said to me, extending a hand. "Levi Ackerman."

I stared at the extended appendage for a few seconds before blinking and shaking it, a little dazed. His hand was thin, his fingers long, but he had a death grip to it. I stretched my fingers discreetly after he'd let go, still feeling awed.

 _Levi_.

I tasted the word in my mouth, turning it around and around until it fit the mold of the man I had in front of me.

"If there's anything else you'd like to know…" He trailed off.

I thought about it. It didn't take long before I knew what to say. "You were gone. For six months. Why…?"

"Army."

I stalled for a second. That was one answer I hadn't been expecting.

"You're a soldier?"

"SA. Special Agent. I only get called for particular missions, undercover shit. You know, brat – you got lucky. That mission should have lasted at least two years."

"Why didn't it?"

There was silence for a few seconds as Levi stared at the cup of tea on the table. I was about to ask again when he suddenly reached forward and plucked the tea strainer from the said cup. I watched silently as he let it drip, then handed it to me. I jumped suddenly when burning hot drops reached my legs, cursing.

"What the-"

"Three minutes max," he said, repeating his earlier words, then raised an eyebrow as I stared without understanding. "It's green tea, brat. You can only let it infuse for so much time before it turns foul. Didn't your mother teach you that?"

His words struck me. I straightened my shoulders. That tea had been meant for my mother, after all.

Before she died.

Obviously, the stranger sitting on my sofa noticed the change in my attitude, because he instantly stood up, his grey, stormy eyes softening just the slightest.

"I'm sorry," he said, and I could tell it wasn't something he was used to saying aloud.

Silently, I took the strainer from him and headed to the kitchen. I dropped it without thinking into the sink, and it was there that my brain decided to turn off. I stood there for what turned out to be minutes, staring down at the soggy tea leaves and at the grey-green liquid oozing slowly from them.

Thinking about my mother.

It was a subject I usually kept as far as was humanly possible from, but tonight it didn't seem like that was going to work. I knew all too well that Levi hadn't meant any harm, couldn't have known that I had all but forgotten about the bag of green tea at the back of my kitchen cupboard, or that I'd bought that tea nearly two years ago for when my mother came over to see me. He couldn't have known that she was dead, or that she'd died barely four months before the day when I first met his gaze outside of Trost Café. I was stalling.

I tightened my fists before heading back into the living room, half expecting to see him gone. But he wasn't. He was quietly sipping his tea, legs crossed and lounged back into the comfortable sofa. He looked up at me when I came back in, looking bored yet again. But if looked more carefully into his eyes, I knew I'd be able to see concern there. The thing was, I didn't _want_ concern. So I avoided his insistent gaze and resumed my place beside him.

I remembered my coffee as I sat down, picking up the cup and bringing it to my lips. It was just about drinking temperature.

"I'm sorry about your mother, brat."

I frowned. I hadn't said anything.

"Your eyes said it all," he said, answering my silent question.

I let a few seconds pass before shrugging silently, avoiding the subject. But Levi wasn't going to let me have it.

"I lost someone too," he said. I didn't look at him or acknowledge his words, but he continued anyway. "Last month. That's why the mission was adjourned this time. There were two SAs undercover. Myself and another woman. Her name was Petra Ral. She was a rookie. I don't know why the fuck our Commanders chose to send her out with me. There were dozens of other choices, but somehow they chose her. She'd never been in real conditions before. She'd had simulations, as does every other rookie, but that was all. She wasn't discreet enough. She asked too many questions. Listened in to one-too-many conversations that didn't concern her. She got caught." There was silence then. Despite myself, I listened to the man's story. I wanted to know what had happened after that.

"They kept her locked up for four weeks. I could hear her screams all the way from my bunk at night when they were with her. I don't know if they'd done it on purpose – keeping her in a room so close to mine. Either way, I couldn't stand it. I knew Petra would never tell them what they wanted to know, and I knew that they'd torture her either until she caved, or until she died. So one evening, I went out on a pretext and called HQ. I told them that it was either them or me. That if they didn't abort the undercover mission and raid the fucking place the next day, with all the men they could, I'd do it alone.

"They answered favourably. Turns out they'd had all the information they needed weeks ago, and had only been waiting for an opportunity like this one to arise. So that very night, forty trained men stormed the place, but when we got to her cell, Petra had already been killed. They'd known we were coming for her, and had slashed her throat just minutes before we got there. Her body was still warm when I picked her up and carried her out of there."

I remained silent, digesting this.

"You do know that I could get sacked immediately for telling you this, right, brat? State secrets and all that shit."

Yes, I did know. And I figured he knew, too, that that wasn't the kind of story I'd tell anyone, not even Mikasa and Armin. I suppose that that was why he was deciding to trust me.

Even though today was the first time we'd ever talked to each other.

"You said you had contacts." He looked at me, puzzled. "You knew my name. You said you had contacts. The army's files were your contacts?"

It made sense then, how he knew me. I understood.

He nodded and breathed a quiet "Yes," before going back to sipping his tea.

"Why were you interested in me?" I asked him brusquely after several seconds of heavy silence. He remained quiet, and that made me stand. I was angry now. Angry at him, for fooling me. " _Why were you interested in me?_ " I said again, louder, demanding an answer that he was unwilling to give me.

He stopped sipping then. I suppose the urgency and the anger in my voice must have made him tick, because I could sense more than see him thinking through whether to answer me or not. And he would. Or else I would show him to the door.

" _Why_ -" I began again, but he cut me off.

"Your father," he said quietly, "was my commanding officer a long time ago. When I began my military career."

I remained silent. That's what I'd thought.

"Out," I said quietly. I looked up when he didn't move, practically shouting- " _Get out_!"

"Eren-"

"I told you to get out!"

" _Eren_ -"

"OUT!"

"I found out what your name was long after I first noticed you!"

I stalled then, unsure of my decision. Wavering on my feet as my eyes met his – determined to stay.

"You-"

"It was only when I left last Spring, before I went on that mission I told you about, that I looked into the archives to find out who you were. I wanted to know. I _needed_ to know."

"Why?" I asked him, confused beyond what I could comprehend, and suddenly on the verge of tears – though I didn't know why. "Why would you want to know who I am? I'm just a normal kid. I'm just like everybody else. Why me? Why…"

"Because you're special, brat. More so than you think. I knew when I first saw you. When our eyes first met in Trost Café – those eyes full of pain and desires for justice. I noticed you, because your eyes looked like eyes I'd seen before. Eyes I'd seen all my life, staring back at me from the mirror in the morning, from the polished elevator doors when they close. They were familiar. _You_ were familiar. As though I'd known you all my life without ever knowing you existed. _That's_ why I followed you around for six months, why I learnt how you lived, found out who your best friends were, what you were studying, what flavour you liked your ice cream, and what colour you shat in the morning. I knew you without knowing a thing about you, and I hated it.

"Today, is my first day back from undercover. The first time in six months that I can finally be myself. The day Petra died was two days ago.

"And I know what a person's eyes look like after they've watched someone die right in front of them. I have for some time now.

"My eyes. And _yours_."

* * *

 _ **A/N:** Alright so, I know this was supposed to be a two-Chapter fic, but it's going to be more. Three or four, maybe. For one thing because this one was turning out to be so much longer than the first chapter, and for another thing because I wanted to content the ones of you that have been so actively demanding a continuation._

 ** _I'm still writing. I haven't dropped any of my works. I'm just a very slow, impulsive, and emotion-driven writer._**

 _I hope you like this one. Tell me what you think in the reviews._

 _~Tenshi._


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